My new home

Well, here I am, at the Centre for Civil Society, where I'm busy finding my feet, meeting the ace people here, and discovering bunny chow. More thoughtful posting will resume once feet are found, folk are faced, and bunnies consumed.

London and me

I'm not a fan of London, and every time I return, I hone my reasons for not liking it here. So, for instance, the "fly Emirates" logos plastered all over the umpires in today's test series: rubbish.

Trouble is, everytime I come, I'm reminded that London has more than its fair share of urban splendour. They tend to be associated, for me at least, with public transport. Call be a girly man, I've a very soft spot for Poems on the Underground  and, today, I'm reminded that while people over the world say the darndest things, the people on the London Underground edit down much better. Fer instance:

• People keep saying that it's not the heat, it's the humidity... but it clearly IS the heat.
• I swear, I've lived in London my whole life and I've never heard of Dollis Hill.
• Rosh Hashanah is a better festival than Glastonbury.
• I use the old 'yoghurt pots and string' routine. Untraceable.

Via Li.

Told you so

Yes indeedy. I've said before that the US privatised justice system was bound to lead to mercenaries and, yes indeed, today we hear

The US military has admitted it detained an Afghan man handed over by a US citizen accused of running a freelance counter-terrorism operation.

. More from the BBC here.

On a tangent (and we have many of those here at Class Worrier) I'm guessing that my being right all the time must be frightfully dull, and I am never to bore. So, starting next week when I settle into my new life in South Africa, look forward to plenty of mistakes, erroneous assumptions, bad judgements, and unseemly observations.

Nah, just kidding. I'll just carry on passing judgement on things I see at the BBC.

The etymology of "people of colour": an appeal

By my bedside at the moment is "Asians in Britain: 400 years of History" by Rozina Visram. It contains a reference to a line item in the accounts of the British Government's Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor dated 1786, referring to "relief to the 'Blacks and People of Colour'"(p. 21). This is the oldest reference to the term 'people of colour' that I've yet seen. Any suggestions in tracking down the etymology gratefully received...

This Land, in the style of the 2004 Election

I only heard about this a couple of days ago, and it seems already to have become an instant flash classic. It's nearly 4Mb, so don't click unless you mean it. Via Chris, Paulina.

Bilbao's better than blogging

Just as I was about to upbraid her for not linking to me, the lovely Josephine over at the The Virtual Tophet has decided that the world's more fun when she doesn't blog, and substantially more fun when she's in the Basque country. Good call.

Blunkwism

This post especially for Chris, over at the Virtual Stoa.

There's an important similarity between David Blunkett's recent thoughts on women's drink culture

'They may be the ones who countenance it rather than calm it,' he said. 'It is not chauvinistic to say the presence of women has often been a calming influence, in terms of young men starting to lay about each other.'

and the Harry Enfield 1950s public announcement parodies which outlined the grim consequences of letting women drive, work, etc, which ended with a stern "Women, Know your place."

Suzanne Moore spotted this back in 2000, but I wonder whether anyone has paused whether it's merely coincidence that the British Home Secretary's sad scramblings for a new moral idiom should so closely resemble the fag-end of nineteenth century Blanquism.

It's the end of liberalism all over again

Well, isn't that peachy? Tony Blair heralds a brave new dawn for British society:

"For the first time in my political lifetime the politicians, public and police are actually on the same side."

What is it that has brought together the population with a unanimity that seems to have escaped every other area of Blair's administration? Why it's law'n'order, of course.
 
It seems that we've all consensed around the end of 60s tolerance, and an end to a British policing philosophy that, only now that it has ended, we are able to deem 'liberal'. The future of British policing will eschew the beads and sandals approach to truncheons, opting instead for a regime that gives communities the power to "enforce respect on the streets".

This new regime comes complete with its own new laws - ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders). And it comes with its own pseudo-science - a nineteenth century blend of back-of-envelope economics, sociology and law. You can read more of the Home Office's intellectual wizardry (with an assist by the LSE) here.
 
What, though, is this anti-social behaviour? Well, it's what "a reasonable person would consider as likely to adversely affect the quiet enjoyment of their home". It's the sort of behaviour that treats 'street drinking' and 'begging' as crimes, and conflates them under a single category. It's the sort of behaviour that Britain's Christian soldiers ought not to meddle in. Yes, it's Back to Basics all over again. And it comes with the treat of suspension of trial by jury which previously had only been used in Northern Ireland.
 
Lord, what kind of a country does Blair think this is? America?

In Memoriam

Paul Foot died last night. There's a good obituary in the Guardian, here

Dio in machina

As we wait for the outcome of Norm's Rock poll, it's good to hear not only that Dio is alive, but that he's running for President, with considered positions on healthcare

stomach pumping at emergency rooms will feature "get one free for every 10 pumps" punch card

and same sex marriage

"Rob Halford wants it, so it's cool with me."

Via Aziz.

Happy Birthday

Wole Soyinka, who turns 70 today. The BBC has more, including Soyinka's response to President Obasanjo's thinking that Nigeria is worth dying for. Soyinka is commendably constructivist: "I'm not setting out to die for any abstruse concept, especially an artificial concept like Nigeria."

Hear my name and tremble

Norm does it.Anthony does it. Which movie villian are you?



I always thought Patel was a rather bland surname. More Patels in the London phone book than any other name. Once went to a party where there were 10 Raj Patels. So. Raj Smith it is then.

Democracy but no power

The following is from a comrade in South Africa, possibly printed in this weekend's Mail and Guardian but nowhere online.

The following is from a letter I wrote to Phambili Nombane, the energy supplier to my community. I would like to share my suffering, and that of my community, which is even greater than mine. I wish to open a debate on the effectiveness of privatisation of social services and how much the community benefits or suffers from it.

I do not know how to express the frustration and bitterness I have suffered due to the inefficiency of your company, which has no respect for the community I live in. I cannot count how many times we have suffered electricity cut-offs, though your clever, selfish prepaid system ensures that I pay up-front for electricity I do not use.

This year alone, your illegal cut-offs have cost me a post-graduate diploma, and my wife an honours degree. This was due to the failure to submit essays, assignments, and projects, or failure to submit them on time, because your company illegally cut off the electricity. We spend entire nights waiting and hoping that the electricity will come on, but in vain. My wife is now excluded from finishing her degree.

We missed supper a number of times, until we realised that we cannot rely on your prepaid electricity and used paraffin for cooking after cut-offs. On many occasions we had to bath in cold water.

We have even been cut off from the world because we cannot charge the batteries for our cellular phones. This resulted in my wife missing an appointment for a job interview as she did not receive the call from the
company.

The cold nights and the cold baths we are often forced to have resulted in increased medical bills for the family.

This is just a glimpse of one family’s suffering — how much more for the entire community?

Phambili Nombane is a progressive name drawing from the tradition of our struggle, which used the slogan “Phambili [Forward]”. But people in my community have very little to claim as victory after 10 years of democracy. Installation of electricity is wrongly perceived as one of the democratic victories.

Gatyeni, my neighbour, told me he heard that frequent cuts-off are caused by ‘illegal’ reconnections. I hope your company is not involved in spreading these fairy tales. I explained to him that the company has got a duty to deliver electricity at all costs, especially electricity we pay for before we use it.

If you consider Gatyeni’s sentiments are shared by other sufferers, these cut-offs have the potential to cause civic violence.
- Tembinkosi Qondela, Site C, Khayelitsha

Clinton Bestseller Skirts Community

India West, "North American's Most Honored Indian Newspaper", has all the news that's fit to print about Indians (sic). Consider their latest front page headline, concerning everyone's favourite presidential grammarian and amnesiac.

Clinton Bestseller Skirts Indian Community
Indian contributors, admirers absent in 957-page door-stopper
...Going by his account, the only "friend" President Clinton has among South Asians is Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded the Grameen Bank..."

The Women of Wal-mart

The thought of winning $300million has clearly been running around my head. I was going to make a joke out of the single most siginificant reason that I've never won the lottery being that I never bought a ticket. But then I realised that the only time I ever won anything, I didn't knowingly enter. Last year, I got a cheque for $13.25, together with a notice saying that I'd been awarded it because my address was in the database of a record chain that had been systematically overcharging its customers, which had subsequently been the subject of a class action law suit.

Class actions are tremendously good things when they can be made to work which is, alas, not all that often. Despite the problems endemic to the concept, I wish this one in particular a great deal of success. It's the largest suit of its kind ever, and stands to benefit 1.5 million of the poorest paid women in America, the past and present female employees of Wal-Mart. Wal-mart, not content with paying rubbish wages also won't promote women to be managers in the aisles of it suburban sweatshops. The data, such as it is, seems compelling, and falls neatly into line with the past criminal behaviour of the company responsible for 2% of US GDP.

In Defence of Imelda Marcos

I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possission belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest anitque shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position... You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust. But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academcially than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

From Walter Benjamin's lovely little essay Unpacking My Library.

Vast sums of money

Geraldine Williams, a cleaning lady from Massachusetts, has just won $294 million ($117.6m after taxes) by playing MegaMillions. But what about the rest of us? Can we not, too, get our hands on wealth sufficient to misty-eye Mammon?

Luckily, the world is full of just these kinds of opportunities. And while Wall Street, the Hollywood hills, Silicon Valley and the Beltway are bristling with salary, you don't have to be a bastard, shite, geek or wonk to get rich quick. The FBI have, since 2001, offered a $25m reward for the capture of Osama Bin Laden, topped off by $2m from the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association. Why steal, sleaze, tinker or rob for a living when you can be working for the unambiguous forces of truth and justice?

Well, the justice market has been working its magic, and yesterday we saw the beginnings of some concrete results. Over to CNN's terror expert:

Afghan authorities have arrested three American citizens accused of running a fake prison in Kabul, U.S. State Department and Afghan officials say.

In these 'fake prisons', people really were imprisoned, and really interrogated, all on the off chance that, together with a tooth or two, they might spit out an answer to the $27m dollar question. Chalk one up to the rational-actor school of social science. .

We're All Going to Die #5

It seems as if trouble-makers are aiming to disrupt the US elections. Instead of chasing up the folk who fucked it up the last time (try clicking this peppery URL), the Department of Homeland Security have put the past behind them, choosing instead to look boldly, if vaguely, into the future. They claim to have received "credible intelligence" that Al Qaeda are going to "disrupt our democratic process".

Although Tom Ridge denies any specific threats to the National Conventions, it's not a stretch to see his warning as a threat to activists such as Direct Action to Stop the War. DASW have every intention of resurrecting some of the better elements of US democratic process, by disrupting the Conventions. Check out RNC Not Welcome, which organizers are hoping will bring tens of thousands to New York City at the end of August, as well as DNC2RNC, a march scheduled to begin at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Update
The New York Times tells of the trouble the Republican National Convention Committee have had in finding appropriate Broadway shows for its delegates.

No one will be sent to see Mark Medoff's play "Prymate," for example, a show that confronts racial sensitivities and has a black actor playing a gorilla. They will not be sent to Tony Kushner's "Caroline, or Change," a serious musical about civil rights. In fact, they will not be sent to anything that touches on contemporary issues.

They will, however, get a touch of philosophy in "The Lion King" when a meerkat and a wart hog sing "Hakuna Matata," the upbeat tune that advises the audience to live with "no worries." In "Wonderful Town," they will get the characters Ruth and Eileen Sherwood singing in "Ohio" of how they long for their home state after coming to Manhattan.

More here

Update 2
The market has responded to Ridge. Futures on oil are above $40. This, no more nor less, is the political economy of fear.

ABCDEs

Yesterday, Jeffrey Sachs, the man who engineered Russia's economic meltdown, took a step closer to redemption by suggesting that Africa ought not to pay its debt. This is something that African groups have been saying for quite a while, but it seems that news organizations take you more seriously if you've been part of the problem first. (Being part of the problem is, of course, something with which I'm familiar, though I don't seem to have reaped nearly as many benefits as Prof Sachs.)

The papers at the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) earlier this year didn't generate nearly as much fuss as Cde Sachs' recent thoughts, but Eric Toussaint's contribution pulled no punches.

...one thing is sure: the regions of the world which have been the most diligent in applying IMF and World Bank recommendations, namely sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Central and Eastern Europe are, according to your own figures, the regions that have experienced the most dramatic increase in absolute poverty.

Via Patrick B.

Microsoft patents blood, skin

The Economist this week runs a story that looks like it belongs in the Onion.

Microsoft, that imperialist of the information-technology world, has actually succeeded in patenting the human body as a computer network. US Patent 6,754,472, issued to the company on June 22nd, is for a “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”...

As the patent puts it, “The physical resistance offered by the human body can be used in implementing a keypad or other input device as well as estimating distances between devices and device locations. In accordance with the present invention, by varying the distance on the skin between the contacts corresponding to different keys, different signal values can be generated representing different inputs.” In other words you can, in theory, type on your skin.

This is clearly a vast improvement on "writing things down", "speaking" and "listening". It all sounds pretty revolutionary, no?

...It all sounds very revolutionary, but Microsoft is not (as is often the case with the firm's “innovations”) actually the pioneer in the field. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory and IBM jointly developed the idea of using the human body as a personal network nearly a decade ago.

More here. Via Patrick.

Conga

A group of activists in paper hats held a party to celebrate the World Bank's 60th birthday in the Bank's Washington DC lobby. The Party Liberation Front cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate, inter alia,

The Bank’s excellent idea of charging of the poorest people in the world a user fee for basic services like going to school or getting healthcare! Though it meant millions didn't go to school (according to UNICEF) and people died after being turned away from hospitals because they couldn't afford the services (according to the WHO), it surely saved lots of money (though some studies have showed it saved almost nothing). ... The Party ended when the PLF formed a conga line to lead employees out of the Bank. Strangely, none of them followed.

More here.Via Soren.

Cinema or Saga?

This summer's summer reading has included Godfrey Hodgson's More Equal Than Others and Halldór Laxness' The Atom Station. Hodgson does a fine job of pulling together the latest data on inequality, and his is the sort of book you want to have around in order to rebut some of the more creative fictions that pass for conservative political theory. One would have wanted a slightly more economically and technologically literate writer (some of the slips in the discussion of internet technologies, or in his thoughts on economic indices, are toe-curling), but it's a solid evidence-based look at what happens when you succumb, as America's vanishing voters have, to the idea that what's good for the first family is good for everyone.

Laxness - expertly translated by TV's Magnus Magnusson - gives us an astute and wonderous look at precisely this moment, a moment when Iceland's first families portray their needs as the needs of everyone. He puts an unschooled and savvy young woman from Northern Iceland into the home of a Member of Parliament in Rekjavik. Working as a maid, she sees the debauchery, mendacity, and dislocation of post-WWII middle-class Iceland. There's a fair bit of romanticism, some of it tongue in cheek, as the North becomes the home of a rapidly vanishing and rugged humanity, untroubled by the childish and bourgeois demands of the psyche. The Icelandic sagas themselves don't bother too much with psychological states as Ugla, our communist heroine, knows. But when the actions of those around her are so vicious, self serving, and distasteful, one doesn't need to fuss a great deal with internal conflict. Many good set pieces send up, with a sour compassion, the follies of rich Rekjavik, Cinema or Saga? being one of the finer subtitles of such. And, as other reviewers have noted, it's a book that's lost none of its relevance. Highly recommended.

Back once again

Hurrah! It's a season for returns. Those toffees covered with chocolate-flavoured-vegetable-oil, Toffets, are back! Read all about them at the Virtual Toffet. Also back again, and a welcome addition to the blogroll, are the good folk at Socialism in an Age of Waiting.

And, oh, I'm back from a variety of travels too. Nice to be home, if only for a week.

Update
Sorry. That'd be Tophet.